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10 Dec 2016 1:54:26am

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I find this to be a well balanced view. There are a few points that one could make to supplement it.

It focuses only on torture, and that is not the only form of inflicting suffering for whatever reason. And Christianity did have a way of trying to enforce its own orthodoxy from very early on, against the various forms of gnosticism. (This, too, was the issue with the crusade against the Cathars, and the setting up of the Inquisition.)

I am not sure that the Catholic Church was the only Christian tradition to be associated with torture and cruelty. If I remember rightly, form example, Calvinist Geneva had some involvement over Giordano Bruno. And the witch hunts and burnings of the 16th and 17th centuries were spread across Europe as well as North America. These were not solely a Catholic phenomenon.

I cannot really see that the notion of penance has much to do with the issue of acknowledging the past and dealing with it. Just as I do not see that Germans today should feel guilty about the Nazi past. But Cavanaugh is correct that it is important to oppose the use of torture, wherever and however it arises. Perhaps there is a particular pertinence to present day USA, and its so-called 'enhanced interrogations' and in its attempts to evade responsibility to its practice of 'rendition'. (A sort of larger scale parallel to the Genevan role with Bruno.

I have the view that any State or society can descend into such evil if it does not maintain vigilance against it, and can too easily slip into such ill and cruelty in the name of 'national security'. If such things happened to Germany in the 1930s, they can equally happen in any of our countries. The USA with it 'global policeman' delusions, and Australia in its wake, are certainly at risk.